Photographer catches rare glimpses of lives of African-American farmers

Initially Jeffrey Sauger was just going to shoot a turkey farm on the eve of Thanksgiving for a grad-school assignment.

But when he got there, the farmer in question was giving a lecture on organic agriculture to a group of black farmers from Illinois. And that's when a light bulb went off in Sauger's head.

The result was a several-year project documenting the lives of America's fast-disappearing African-American farmers, an intimate look at a little-known population that forms the basis of "Where the Furrows Run Deep" at Pontiac's Museum of New Art (MONA).

Here's one measure of the show's punch: It was supposed to run until July 17, but will come down at the end of Wednesday. That's to accommodate the needs of the Jack Hanley Gallery in New York City, which wanted the show and needed it immediately. So if you're interested in seeing it here, you'd better act fast.

Sauger, 42, of Royal Oak was named the 2000 Photographer of the Year by the Michigan Press Photographers Association.

Of this project, he says, he just wanted to produce an historical document of visual anthropology. But his black-and-white images -- all shot on film -- reach far beyond journalism, achieving a limpid beauty in their treatment of broken American dreams.

"I'm really influenced by the work of the 1930s Farm Security Administration," Sauger says, "and that whole photographic mission to document a time and class of people." As part of the New Deal, the FSA and the Works Progress Administration hired out-of-work photographers -- Roy Stryker, William Albert Allard and Dorothea Lange among them -- to document American rural poverty.

What they produced electrified subsequent generations of photographers.

Most of Sauger's work was shot in the Midwest and Virginia on this shoestring mission of the heart. Sauger used film because at the time he couldn't afford a digital camera.

"My dog Luna and I camped out, slept in parking lots and crashed at some farmers' houses," he says, describing his travels over two years.

In the 1920s, Sauger will tell you, there were 1 million black farmers. Today there are fewer than 18,000.

"At this rate," he says, "they're going to be extinct in no time."

Back at MONA, director Jef Bourgeau regrets that "Furrows" won't be up for its full run, but was more than willing to release it when the big time came calling.

"It's been a great show to exhibit," Bourgeau says. "And that was made all the more obvious by the quick grab from the New York gallery."